Murdo Fraser: “Time to get real about our situation”
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Leadership candidate Murdo Fraser has released the presentation http://toryhoose.com/files/Murdo%20Fraser%20Presentation.pdf he will give at rallies around Scotland for the remainder of the election campaign.
The presentation shows that the Scottish Conservative vote has halved since 1997, which many still wrongly believe to be the party’s all-time low. It predicts that, if the party continues to lose regional list votes at the same rate as it has been since 1999, the party will be reduced to under 7% of the vote in just over 10 years – the same vote share as Tommy Sheridan’s SSP achieved in 2003.
Murdo said:
“I have been an activist for our party for 25 years. I, and thousands of members like me, have worked tirelessly for decades for this party. The least the members deserve is to know the unvarnished, unspun truth about the state we’re in.
“The reality is that, despite having popular and effective leaders such as Annabel Goldie and David McLetchie, we go backwards at every election. We have lost well over 100,000 votes since devolution, and if our trend goes on we will be reduced to a rump like the Greens and the SSP used to be.
“Our party has an identity problem. Despite good leaders and good policies, many centre-right Scots don’t vote for us because they don’t think we stand up for their interests.
“It’s time to get real about our situation. It’s time we stopped pulling the wool over the eyes of our members by pretending everything is going to get better if we simply shout louder. What do the candidates in this election think is going to make them more successful than Annabel without any form of radical change?
“None of the candidates in this election, including me, can steer this ship back to success. A new captain is not enough. We need a new ship.”
“We need a new ship” you also need a new crew and a new purpose. Since 1997 a lack of policies hasn’t helped.
[...] return, Fraser issued a press release yesterday http://www.toryhoose.com/2011/09/murdo-fraser-%e2%80%9ctime-to-get-real-about-our-situation%e2%80%9d... by claiming the Party risked becoming the size of the Greens unless members “get [...]
In point of fact the Party has had any number of new policies since Devolution and quite a few have been implemented by the Scottish Administration, business rate abolition for small businesses being a very good example.
Our main problem is that lots of Scots agree with our policies but don’t vote for us. The question as to why they don’t vote for us is the key to this Leadership election. One might add that Labour have now got exactly the same problem, albeit to a lesser extent.
On the plus side, the glue that holds the widely disparate SNP’s own internal coalition together ranging from left-wing Socialists to right-wing Nationalists is utterly dependent on success in the Referendum. There is no guarantee that it will be successful. Indeed, the evidence from Quebec and Italy’s Northern League suggests that it will never be successful.